How Many Woodcock should a Woodcock shooter shoot?
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We were walking up Llanvihangel Hill, in that strange border country where the landscape is described in Welsh that the locals can no longer understand. Hybrid names like Upper Cwminon or Cefn Hir Dingle, the mangled sound of Caety Traylow, and everywhere on the moorland the mawn pools, named from the Welsh word for the peat once dug there for fuel. This is the most ordinary and yet also the most particular of places. Once I loved what I saw there as wildness in the landscape and independence of character in the people, but a once-dramatic landscape seems slowly to be becoming boring, with my growing awareness of just how little life, apart from the eternal sheep, exists here, in these hillsides stripped of vegetation by their remorseless grazing, gnawing the hillsides like maggots. The dominance of the sheep seems reflected in the rural culture of sheep and battered Landrovers ranging over these bare uplands, treeless almost, windswept, and yet still tinctured with a wildness of wide vistas and pillowing clouds rising in the thermals over land warmed by the sun that stirs the spirits of us all, poor forked creatures that expand and relax when freed from the fear of cold and wet and hunger by the spring sunshine. There is no music of this place, and the chapels that killed it lie empty now. But high on Glascwm Hill the curlews were crying. They had a nest somewhere in the grass above, and they defended it, circling above us chittering and crying. We dropped down the hillside and the curlews relaxed a little, calling now with the ringing call that stirs my vitals, the stirring spiralling rising call that climbs as if upon the hillside and then falls away on the other side. A call that is for all of us that love it the call of wild places, of beautiful places, of rare wildness and nostalgia. Even this impoverished countryside seemed richly wild when the curlews skated across the up-draughts calling their anxiety for those four mottled eggs nestled among the rushes.
How Many Woodcock should a Woodcock shooter shoot?
How Many Woodcock should a Woodcock shooter…
How Many Woodcock should a Woodcock shooter shoot?
We were walking up Llanvihangel Hill, in that strange border country where the landscape is described in Welsh that the locals can no longer understand. Hybrid names like Upper Cwminon or Cefn Hir Dingle, the mangled sound of Caety Traylow, and everywhere on the moorland the mawn pools, named from the Welsh word for the peat once dug there for fuel. This is the most ordinary and yet also the most particular of places. Once I loved what I saw there as wildness in the landscape and independence of character in the people, but a once-dramatic landscape seems slowly to be becoming boring, with my growing awareness of just how little life, apart from the eternal sheep, exists here, in these hillsides stripped of vegetation by their remorseless grazing, gnawing the hillsides like maggots. The dominance of the sheep seems reflected in the rural culture of sheep and battered Landrovers ranging over these bare uplands, treeless almost, windswept, and yet still tinctured with a wildness of wide vistas and pillowing clouds rising in the thermals over land warmed by the sun that stirs the spirits of us all, poor forked creatures that expand and relax when freed from the fear of cold and wet and hunger by the spring sunshine. There is no music of this place, and the chapels that killed it lie empty now. But high on Glascwm Hill the curlews were crying. They had a nest somewhere in the grass above, and they defended it, circling above us chittering and crying. We dropped down the hillside and the curlews relaxed a little, calling now with the ringing call that stirs my vitals, the stirring spiralling rising call that climbs as if upon the hillside and then falls away on the other side. A call that is for all of us that love it the call of wild places, of beautiful places, of rare wildness and nostalgia. Even this impoverished countryside seemed richly wild when the curlews skated across the up-draughts calling their anxiety for those four mottled eggs nestled among the rushes.